Wednesday, October 8, 2014

One of our latest projects was creating some wooden arrows to decorate above our TV. I totally fell on the DIY pallet band wagon. Free? Yes! Distressed? Yes! We got two pallets and went straight to work...

...for about 10 minutes. Have you ever tried to deconstruct a pallet? No? Well it is incredibly difficult and not to mention dirty and gross. If I was going to have hubby's help with this project I needed to make a change. Straight to Lowe's we went to see what our options were. We looked around for a little bit and weren't liking what we saw. Then we stumbled upon these packs of cedar wall paneling and they were perfect! Like only $10 perfect! We were planning on making 9 chevron arrow things and these ended up being the exact amount of material that we needed. I think they came as a pack of 6 boards that were 8 ft long. Hubby cut them to the correct length and then mitered all of the ends at 45 degrees.

Freshly cut and ready to be distressed

First I stained the back side of them with some Rust-oleum wood stain in Kona. The fronts are smooth and finished but the backs are rough and unsanded - the look that I was going for. I have no idea what the proper way to stain stuff is so I just used a foam brush to paint it on then waited various amounts of time before I wiped it off with a rag :)

You'll need three foam brushes- one each for stain, paint, and glue

After one coat

Next I watered down some grey paint samples that we had leftover. I followed the same process as the stain. On some of the sections I did two or three coats and on others I did just a very very light coat and immediately wiped it off.

Some boards with the grey paint wash - waiting to be wiped off

I glued 4 pieces of varying finishes together - two interlocked on top and bottom and then down the middle. I used some of the scraps that we had from the miter saw to serve as a sort of backing plate. This got glued to the back to keep everything together. (Wood glue and cameras don't mix so I don't have any pictures of this part. I'm a messy DIYer)

Our initial plan was to just use double sided tape to secure these to the wall (they are super lightweight.) We decided to nail them in after they were positioned on the wall for extra support... I didn't want them falling off the wall in the middle of the night a few months from now.

You can see the scrap that I glued to the back to keep everything together and the tape pieces.

For a total cost of less than $20 I'd say it is a success!

Once we install our sound system I think we are going to mount our TV to the wall and hide the cords. Hooray for progress! It is so nice to not have that big empty space above our TV anymore.